


“Jedi Knight Siriana ‘Siri’ Tachi, Or Karayen Arœna Kelbek Namidka: A Woman Owned By No Being”

by Polgarawolf



Series: Star Wars: You Became to Me [44]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Civil War, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Jedi emotions/relationships, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional Manipulation, Expanded Universe Character Death(s), Expanded Universe Characters, F/F, F/M, Fake Miscarriage, Family, Family Secrets, Grief/Mourning, Hypocrisy, Jedi (sacrificial ethics), Jedi Code, Lies, Loss, Love-sickness, M/M, Manipulations, Obi-Wan Kenobi equals unrequited love (unless you're Anakin Skywalker), Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Politics, Secret Child, Secret Identity, Secret Relationship, Secrets, Sexism, Sith machinations, Slavery, Space Pirates, War, dark side
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-15
Updated: 2008-09-15
Packaged: 2017-11-13 19:52:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polgarawolf/pseuds/Polgarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is seventy-five random but chronological moments from the life of Jedi Knight Siriana ‘Siri’ Tachi (given name Karayen Arœna Kelbek Namidka), a talented pilot and fairly close friend of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s who (unfortunately for her) harbors unrequited romantic feelings for Obi-Wan for most of her life. There is an actual story here – one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together – but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Jedi Knight Siriana ‘Siri’ Tachi, Or Karayen Arœna Kelbek Namidka: A Woman Owned By No Being”

**Author's Note:**

> **Author’s Notes: 1.)** Again, this is compatible with my SW AU series **_You Became to Me_** , including my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the lens of Siri’s eyes. **2.)** Although this is technically modeled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere on the LJ (I don’t recall from where anymore, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info for the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to the challenge associated with that set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Siri. **3.)** Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters like Siri or for original characters, for that matter, should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! For clarity's sake, though, please know that I picture a vividly blue-eyed version of Katee Sackhoff as Siri Tachi, Phoebe Cates as the original character of Chalactan Jedi Knight Nemaria Tennyai (Ferus Olin's first Master), and Robert Pattinson (with appropriate streaky hair) as Ferus Olin. Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and that readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! **4.)** It’s my considered opinion that somebody somewhere royally screwed up when they decided to place Mace Windu’s date of birth roughly only fifteen to sixteen years prior to Obi-Wan’s and _then_ to make Mace the Master of Depa Billaba _and_ to place her on the High Council at the time of the events of TPM and to behave as if both Mace and Depa were still basically human norm, despite coming from worlds with cultures distinct enough to merit names of their own, as though for near-humans (meaning that, logically, someone who really shouldn’t have been much older than Obi-Wan – eight years or so, at most, perhaps – and therefore while old enough to have been Knighted most likely would not have been quite old enough to have already taken and trained a Padawan long enough to have seen that apprentice Knighted and so had some kind of logical claim to the title of Jedi Master would nonetheless have already been made a member of the High Council); however, I’m not about to try to mess with these dates, other than to say that Mace was probably born on the very first day of the year in which he’s reported to have been born and that he and Depa both advanced so quickly in their studies that the High Council’s permission (though only ever extremely rarely granted) was sought and granted to allow him to apprentice Depa early, which in turn permitted her to become a Knight fairly early and to take on an apprentice of her own early, and so on and so forth. Shylar (an EU character who appears or is mentioned in only three different sources, so far as I know), though definitely a Jedi, is never assigned a specific Master in the EU, and so I’ve given her to Depa, to solve both the problem of Depa needing a Padawan to train and Shylar needing a Master to apprentice her. 
> 
> **Story Notes:** **1.)** Since this is part of a larger on-going AU series that in some respects fairly closely mirrors or follows events of canon (up to a certain point, anyway), readers should please keep in mind that certain characters and events from the prequel movies/novelizations of the films and even events/places/people referenced in the EU or Expanded Universe may be mentioned or alluded to in this story. If anyone has any questions about whether someone or something is AU, canon, or EU canon, please feel free to ask! **2.)** Readers should probably be aware that I am roughly estimating (guestimating might be a better word) the original publication date for most of the character study pieces in the **_You Became to Me_** series (and indeed most of my stories, especially the ones written over a long period of time), based on when I roughed out notes for them in the story notebooks I carry everywhere with me and when I can recall having worked on certain groups of characters. The year is going to be accurate, but the month might be off and the day will almost certainly be randomly chosen, since the online account I had originally posted many of these stories to no longer exists. I tend to go back and edit things that are in series whenever I get the time or a new idea causes me to have to make room for something else plot-wise, and odds are good that a story could have been edited for typos as recently as the day of its posting here, but the original version will likely be much older and fairly close to the publication date that I attach to it, if anyone's curious!

**"Jedi Knight Siriana ‘Siri’ Tachi, Or Karayen Arœna Kelbek Namidka: A Woman Owned By No Being"**

 

　

 **01.) Orphan:** She is not a child of Coruscant, nor is she (quite) an orphan, as some of her closest friends in the Order are, though she will not discover this until she is twenty-three: the daughter of an extremely young and thoroughly spoiled lady of a somewhat minor but ancient noble house long associated with the Mothmas of Chandrila (by the name of Adilai Carshela Kelbek) and the middle son of a wealthy Corellian shipping magnate (named Volthan Beric Namidka), wed for less than a year prior to the young man’s untimely death by violence during an attack by pirates on a shipping run out in the Mid Rim, her heartbroken mother (eventually) was persuaded only after her own parents became involved (coming down squarely on the side of the Jedi, likely due to the fact that they wished to be able to eventually finesse a second, far better marriage for their lovely youngest daughter, since she was now widowed) to give Siri up to the Jedi Temple for training, on the condition that she would be able to periodically check with the Masters as to Siri’s progress and overall health and happiness within the Order and that she might be able to communicate with her daughter, if it fell out that she remained within the Order past her childhood, once Siri had been Knighted; thus, much to Siri’s own surprise, she would eventually discover both a good friend and a strong ally in her young mother.

 **02.) Name:** Long before Siri discovers the circumstances of her familial background, she comes to strongly suspect that she may have come from either a broken home or a family devastated by violent death: the name that she has always been told is hers, as a Jedi – the name specifically given to her by her family, for her time within the Jedi Order – has the singular significance of denoting that she is named for both a (gloriously beautiful, fair) victory and a very specific type of bladed weapon (a long, slender, fairly deeply curved blade – with the tang also curving in accord with the blade – with but one very sharp edge, to be precise) once commonly used (and sometimes still ceremoniously trained with or carried) on Chandrila, whereas her full true name (her legal name, a name that she apparently gave up the right to claiming, outside of binding legal records, for so long as she remains a part of the Jedi Order) signifies the generous darkness, slaughter or carnage, the lovely, colorfully winged large insects that metamorphose themselves from wormlike larva on Corellia (and which have the unfortunate habit of deriving nourishment primarily from dung and rotting vegetable matter, especially fruit, as well as from flower nectar), and the kind of tears that specifically come only from genuine pain, meaning that her names are somewhat . . . contradictory (some might even say more than a little schizophrenic) in nature (especially given the fact that the diminutive or nickname she has given out to others as her true name since she was old enough to speak apparently means secret or secrecy and so connotes shadows or things hidden in the ancient language of her father’s people).

 **03.) Boy:** She’s neither blind nor nearly so weak in the Force as to be able to avoid sensing those who are obviously strong with its power, and so of course she notices Obi-Wan Kenobi almost as soon as he is first brought down to the crèche (after having been released from the Healers’ Ward, though his condition was still rather frail, the young boy having been shockingly near to death when Knight Qui-Gon Jinn first managed to get him to the Temple) – the boy is so strong in the Force, so full of its power ( _all_ the frakkin’ time), that she’d have to be blind and deaf and dumb and utterly insensate/insensitive to the chords of power that are the Force to _not_ notice him – but she is about two years younger than he is, and, at least at first, she’s both too young and uncoordinated to even try to get near to him (often kept entirely off to other parts of the crèche than he is, because of her relative youth, being only about a year old, herself, when he’s first brought to the Temple), and, in any case, he’s too entirely surrounded by other beings (especially his three best friends, Garen Muln, Reeft, and Bant Eerin, whom the instructors in the crèche have taken to smiling over in amusement and referring to as the Fearsome Foursome) to really do much of anything else but watch him from a distance, anyway, and just soak in the enormously complex and beautiful tapestry of Force melodies and harmonics that follow him everywhere.

 **04.) Girl:** She’s nothing at all special – just a small, pale, fair-haired, blue-eyed human girl in possession of a mouth that’s liable to get her in trouble in more ways than one (though she won’t understand the reason why those almost overly full lips could be a problem until she’s nine and starts to hit her first major growth spurt not as a youngling but as a rapidly maturing young woman), especially since her head is stubbornly hard and her temper’s prone to getting the better of her – and she makes friends with Darsha Assant at first half because Darsha is even smaller and paler than Siri is and half because Darsha’s seemingly mild temperament seems like it would logically make a good foil for Siri’s own hotheadedness; it will be genuine affection for the pale little slip of a girl and her quiet, sly wit that will end up truly cementing the bond of friendship between them, though, and, afterwards, the two fair-haired human girls are all but inseparable.

 **05.) Hypocrisy:** She has some serious issues with the Order’s rules almost from the beginning – even as a child, the hypocrisy latent in an organization that supposedly eschew’s attachments and all forms (all bonds) of affection while actually encouraging a strong, almost child-parent type of relationship between each Master and apprentice, and which actively forbids its members to marry or have families of their own and strongly discourages contact with other blood kin _unless_ a specific member happens to belong to a species with a dangerously low overall population and _unless_ having good relations with blood kin might in some way benefit the Order, not to mention forbidding its female members to bear children (unless they are among the few given permission to marry, to help keep a species from being in danger of extinction) while all but actively encouraging its male members to spread their seed from one end of the galaxy to the next and back again, via meaningless short-lived flings while on mission, to help bolster the number of Force-sensitives born in the galaxy, _really_ rubs her the wrong way – but she also believes wholeheartedly in what the Order stands for and the Force sings to her of rightness whenever she contemplates a future for herself as a Jedi, so, despite the problems she has with so many of the Order’s rules, it never really occurs to her that she could ever be anything but a Jedi.

 **06.) Anger:** To be honest, Siri isn’t sure why the Order condemns anger entirely out of hand (in her opinion, anger is just anger – neither good nor bad – and what matters is what one _does_ with it, whether one chooses to use it to build or to destroy, not whether or not one _feels_ it at all) – after all, passion (which is very little more than anger controlled enough to be channeled towards a constructive end) is what has overthrown tyrants and freed prisoners and slaves and helped to build systems that won’t tolerate the rise of more tyrants; what has brought justice where there was only savagery; what has created true freedom where before there was nothing but fear; what has helped souls to rise from the bitter ashes of their horrible lives and inspired them to build something better, stronger, more beautiful – but to the Jedi Order the Code is law, and the Jedi Code says that there is no anger, no passion, and so there she is, stuck trying to rid herself of something that she honestly thinks could be directed towards more constructive ends, if only the Order would allow her to use it instead of ordering her to try to uproot it from herself entirely.

 **07.) Problem:** Eventually, she’ll come to decide that probably the worst problem with the Order (aside from all that hypocrisy) is that the whole damned system seems to be set up to make its members solitary and as self-isolating as possible – initiates in the crèche are all taught to want to become full Jedi Knights (and, eventually, Masters, too), even though the perpetual shortage of trained and not yet partnered off or otherwise free to be partnered Knights and Masters when compared to the number of potential apprentices _guarantees_ that there will never be enough to go around and that the initiates must therefore essentially compete amongst themselves to try to individually catch the eye of one of those able to become Masters to one of them; the insistence on control and on purging oneself of all attachments and emotions from the very beginning of one’s training in the crèche, combined with a system that essentially pits initiates against each other competitively in the attempt to become accepted as Padawan learners, means that most initiates are likely to be loners or else to function as part of a small group of friends, with that group normally not being inclusive towards other such cliquish groups, in order to protect the weaknesses of the individual initiates and keep them from being known and (thus) possibly used against them by others who might very well be willing to do just about anything to ensure their own eventual apprenticeships, even if it means utterly destroying someone else’s chance to be taken to Padawan; the eventual isolation of each individual Padawan with his or her or its Master and the shipping of initiates who have failed to be chosen as apprentices off to various branches of the Jedi Service Corps means that ties formed in the crèche generally gradually fray and thin or even break (if they aren’t willingly severed) entirely, over time, while the bond formed with a Master is necessarily designed to eventually be broken, with so much respect usually lingering on afterwards between a new Knight and a former Master that even those once belonging to truly close Master-Padawan pairs will never quite manage to become the kind of real equals necessary to engender a full and honest friendship, and group missions are generally undertaken so rarely that even those who work together as Padawans or as Knights and/or Masters are rarely allowed the chance to come into any sort of truly meaningful contact with one another, when their missions are completed; the continued isolation of Knights in single quarters and of Masters who are kept in the same sort of quarters, unless that Knight or Master has chosen an apprentice to teach, only adds to the thinning and breaking of previous bonds, among friends in the crèche and allies gained over the course of any group missions; and the continued habit of competition leads to vying for one of the _extremely_ limited seats on the High Council or an eventual placement on or over one of the other major councils or important long-running Temple projects (such as the Archives), meaning that Knights and Masters are also highly unlikely to form truly strong bonds with others within the Order: all in all, it means that individual members must struggle through everything essentially alone, rising or falling with no one standing by to help in times of trouble or need or to mourn after a setback or fall – when she is young, though, all she really knows is that the Temple seems a very lonely sort of place, and that it seems somehow wrong to her that there is no real support system in place to help those are yet young to the Order (or even those who’ve been in the Order long enough to have come face to face with real temptation) stay on the right path and avoid falling prey to any kind of danger involved in training to become a Jedi.

 **08.) Lightning:** What happens to Obi-Wan when he supposedly falls ill is the most terrifying thing she’s ever witnessed in her young life – it’s like watching waves of atonal, ugly, hurtful, _Dark_ sound crash into the most lovely and delicate and intricate and heart-wrenchingly beautiful song, in an effort to overpower and cancel out and so wipe that song entirely out of existence, and the eruption of what seriously looks like blue-white chain lightning breaking out all over his body only makes it worse, especially since he screams and _screams_ and **_screams_** like it’s actually burning him up – and she’s nearly hysterical with fear by the time he finally loses consciousness.

 **09.) Chant:** She likes to think of herself as observant, but apparently she wasn’t watching in the right direction at the right time, because she’s as shocked as if someone just walking past her in a hallway had suddenly hauled off and slapped her, for no reason at all, when she sneaks off one day to try to visit Obi-Wan in the Healers’ Ward by herself, only to find Quinlan Vos (the Kiffar boy so many Knights and Masters whisper shouldn’t have been allowed in the Order in the first place, though Master Tholme certainly seems to think the youngling is Jedi material, teaching him almost everything himself and keeping him so long at his lessons that Quinlan’s hardly ever in the crèche at all, except to sleep. He’s older than them – two and a half, maybe even three years older than Obi-Wan, and, given that Obi-Wan’s about two years older than she is, that makes Quinlan easily over twice her age – and much larger, and she knows very little about him, aside from what everyone in the Temple knows, namely, that his parents died violently and he’s an extremely strong psychometrist and that’s why Master Tholme brought him to the Temple to be trained) there before her, sitting on Obi-Wan’s bed for all the worlds as if he truly belonged there, one hand curled protectively around Obi-Wan’s utterly lax right hand and the other carding slowly, rhythmically, through Obi-Wan’s coppery hair, the older boy leaning down over Obi-Wan, murmuring softly in some language she doesn’t recognize, his voice pitched somewhere in between the kind of fervent speech one makes when reciting a particularly moving address or verse and the singsong rise and fall of a religious chant, his dark eyes fixed so unswervingly on Obi-Wan’s face that he doesn’t even see her there at all, thankfully allowing her to creep back out of the room and flee (utterly unnerved by the whole experience) to a safe distance.

 **10.) Close:** When Obi-Wan _finally_ (after a little over thirteen months, when even his best friends are beginning to despair of him waking up ever again) regains consciousness, Garen behaves as though he thinks that Obi-Wan will vanish away completely, if he or one of his best friends aren’t around to keep an eye on Obi-Wan for literally _every_ second of _every single_ day, and, though she can certainly empathize with the sentiment of concern that belief reveals (spitting Sith hells, she’s worried about him herself, especially considering how utterly _different_ he seems, now, as if most of the joy and the life have somehow been bodily ripped out of him, many of the densely layered melodies and counterpoint melodies of the complex, beautiful, uplifting harmonics that always seemed to surround him, before, in the Force either muted or seemingly entirely silenced, now), the whole thing with the attempted closing of ranks of his three closest friends around Obi-Wan gets awfully old incredibly fast, as do the increasingly dark looks that Garen specifically starts shooting her way, when she fails to take the hint and butt out, as though he’s trying to scare her or warn her off or something.

 **11.) Naïve:** She’s so incredibly (ridiculously!) naïve that it doesn’t even occur to her until several years after the fact that Garen and Quinlan were probably both just as fascinated by and in love with Obi-Wan as she was (and remains), and it’s not until the day that particular revelation dawns that a lot of the possessive behavior from Garen and things like the way that (after Obi-Wan’s revival) Quinaln always seemed (and seems) to be lurking about in the background whenever he could manage it (quietly watching over Obi-Wan) begin to make all that much sense to her.

 **12.) Temper:** Siri _knew_ , from the moment she first met Master Adi Gallia, that the blue-eyed Corellian Jedi with the traditional Tholoth headdress (signifying the ancestry of her mother’s kin) was the one meant to be her Master; thus, in all the time that Obi-Wan is Qui-Gon Jinn’s apprentice, she never quite manages to entirely understand just how in all of the Sith hells Obi-Wan could’ve possibly ended up with (or been meant to end up with) Qui-Gon when the Knight had already specifically refused to take him on as his Padawan, and it isn’t until many years later (and it’s a damned good thing that it would take so long, too, because otherwise she’s fairly sure that she would’ve lost her temper spectacularly and done something easily bad enough to end up getting expelled from the Order for it), when she finds out what Master Yoda did, to get Qui-Gon into a position where he would essentially have no choice but to accept Obi-Wan as his Padawan learner – actually refusing his approval to several different Knights and Masters who were all hugely interested in being the one to apprentice Obi-Wan and denying them permission to even approach Obi-Wan about their wishes, in effect leaving Obi-Wan to think that no one thought him worthy enough to desire him as a Padawan – that she fully comprehends not only just how what happened truly managed to come about, but just how far from the will of the Force the Jedi Order has allowed itself to fall: when she does finally find out, she’s so utterly furious and feels so betrayed by the Order that she rants and raves and breaks several dozens of glasses and dishes in her private little suite, not to mention being so hurt and upset for Obi-Wan’s sake that she records and leaves Yoda a comm message, angrily telling him that he should be very careful of assumptions wherein the ends are seen to justify the means, since such reasoning is morally relativistic and comprises a slippery slope that almost _always_ ends in darkness and misery.

 **13.) Cry:** Siri _never_ should’ve trusted herself to try to say anything to Obi-Wan, when he finally arrived back at the Temple from Melida/Daan: she was still so full of anger and fear and panicky terror over the thought of having come so very close to losing him to that planet and its Young faction that it made her vicious, causing her to hurt him badly with her venomous spite when, as it turned out, Obi-Wan had only been trying to fulfill the mission given to him and his Master by the High Council, and it was his Master, Knight Qui-Gon Jinn, who’d clearly abandoned both his duty and his apprentice, in order to selfishly rush his wounded friend, Knight Tahl, back to the Temple for healing, without ever even bothering to try to fulfill the mission’s real mandate first, and she’s so wholly ashamed of herself, when Quinlan hunts her down and all but spits the truth of the matter out to her between his rage-clenched teeth, that she begins to cry and cannot stop sobbing for nearly half an hour, even though she hardly ever weeps and hates with a passion to ever look so weak as to be that vulnerable in front of any other being.

 **14.) Center:** The instructors at the Temple may be diligently seeking to teach her the value of patience and Obi-Wan may be helping her to find and to keep her calm center under pressure, to retain her serenity and not give in to her anger, so that Master Gallia will find her fit to become her Padawan, when she is finally of age to be made a proper apprentice; however, there’s nothing and no one in all the ’verse capable of making her _not_ be glad that the traitorous beast, Bruck Chun, managed to kill himself with his own treachery, knowing as she so absolutely does that she would’ve had no choice but to hunt down and kill the worthless little pissant traitor herself, if he hadn’t fallen down that waterfall and died ( _especially_ since she’d really like to be able to resurrect and then kill him again, for making poor Obi-Wan blame himself for not being able to save the murderous wretch too, along with Bant), after all the trouble and pain he’s caused not only her friends ( _especially_ Obi-Wan), but the Order, as a whole, too.

 **15.) Like:** Siri doesn’t like Qui-Gon Jinn at _all_ : she wasn’t sure at first (he seemed like a decent enough being, after all, when he first brought Obi-Wan to the Temple and spent so much time and energy on the boy, helping to make sure that he was taken care of properly and that he was adjusting well to life at the Temple, before he lost – well, threw away, really, to be honest, from what she understands – Xanatos), and (despite not really understanding how Knight Jinn could possibly be the one for Obi-Wan, if he’d been able to refuse him once before taking him on as his Padawan) she wanted to be able to give him the benefit of the doubt, when he first became Obi-Wan’s Master (after all, Obi-Wan was just so very proud to be Knight Jinn’s apprentice and he so obviously looked up to his new Master so very much); after everything with Xanatos is said and done, though, and Qui-Gon pretty much deliberately drives his former Padawan to his death and Obi-Wan comes back to the Temple not just distraught but absolutely shattered, blaming himself for not being able to do anything to stop Xanatos from leaping into that acid pit, well . . . when she comes across Obi-Wan in the Temple gardens crying so hard that Quinlan literally has to pick him up off of the lawn and shake him a little to remind him to breathe, and, later that same day, when Garen and Quinlan practically have to carry Obi-Wan back to his room, after an attempted sparring session meant to help Obi-Wan work off some of his excess emotions and help him regain his calm and control apparently got so out of hand that, afterwards, she won’t be able to get more than a few fearful whispers out of anyone about the Force-storm that exploded out of Obi-Wan and seemingly wrecked the whole sparring hall . . . and when Qui-Gon does nothing for all of that week but to smile consistently and often, as if from real joy . . . well, then, she’s positively sure that she quite frankly neither respects nor cares for Knight Jinn at all, _period_.

 **16.) Young:** She’s too young to really remember Knight Jinn’s former apprentice, Xanatos, all that much, or to understand why Obi-Wan’s friends are all so genuinely aggrieved on account of his demise, much less to comprehend why Obi-Wan (of all people!) is taking the villain’s death by suicide (the monster having apparently believed that suicide would be preferable to capture by Qui-Gon Jinn and his new apprentice) so terribly hard; she’s not stupid, though, and she’s certainly able to piece together what little others know and are willing to share about the former Padawan apprentice and to arrive at the conclusion that there’s a _lot_ more to that young man’s story than she knows or can even guess after, and it aggravates her to no end that seemingly the whole of the Order can be so damned secretive about the history of one former Padawan learner and fallen, Dark Jedi, especially since it’s having such a negative impact on poor Obi-Wan!

 **17.) Grateful:** For whatever reasons, Obi-Wan is never really the same again, after Xanatos’ death by suicide, and Siri is grateful to finally be old enough to be made a Padawan for at least one wholly unselfish reason, as it means that she will at least occasionally be able to go on missions with him now and can therefore keep a watchful eye on him herself, so that he cannot, in his apparently newly found (extreme and frightening) carelessness for his own continued safety and well-being, accidentally succeed in hurting himself or getting himself hurt seriously.

 **18.) Monster:** To be perfectly honest, though she certainly hasn’t been expecting things to suddenly (magically) become easier, now that she’s finally a proper apprentice, she also hadn’t imagined that being a Padawan and going on missions would be quite so terrifying or difficult: for example, she thinks it’s entirely possible that Jenna Zan Arbor frightens her more than any monster, real or imagined, ever possibly could, if for no other reason than that the woman seems so very human, on the outside, and yet there’s obviously nothing whatsoever remotely human within her at all, her heart being as cold and empty and immovable as a glacier, her conscience utterly nonexistent, her soul (if she even has one) so alien and ugly and strange that gazing upon it might very well give even a true monster nightmares, and her mind so twisted that Siri is frankly terrified of ever looking the woman in the eyes, fearful of getting some inkling from the shadows within those eyes of what might be going on, behind them.

 **19.) Different:** Stupid little romantic that she is, she has dreams for years, afterwards, of how things could have gone and how wonderful it could have been, after Obi-Wan had to save her from Ona Nobis (the seemingly insanely talented and gleefully violent Sorrusian bounty hunter hired by Zan Arbor to capture Jedi for her experiments), if only the circumstances had been a little bit different: if the shadow of Knight Jinn’s time as a prisoner of Zan Arbor hadn’t been hanging over them; if her own Master hadn’t eventually been forced to send Nobis plummeting to her death, to keep the insanely vengeful Sorrusian woman from coming after them again and _again_ and **_again_** , until perhaps she could finally succeed in hurting one of them or maybe even killing some poor innocent bystander; and, as it later turns out, if only Obi-Wan would’ve been able to understand just how much she was in love with him and to truly return the feeling, if he hadn’t taken that Force-cursed vow of chastity and chosen to use the Force to alter his natural biochemistry to ensure that he would not only be able but essentially be forced to keep that vow!

 **20.) Nightmare:** She has one nightmare about Ona Nobis, after that terrifying mission involving the Force-obsessed scientist Jenna Zan Arbor – the bald, slim yet well-muscled, lightly armored, surprisingly lovely near-human bounty hunter’s dark eyes glittering with manic glee as she comes after them, flicking that deadly laser-enabled glowing fuchsia whip (so very reminiscent of a lightwhip, though the technology behind it was undeniably different, the laser being something that could be manually turned up and down and not being nearly as powerful as a lightwhip, even at the highest setting, not to mention possessing but that one lone long strand, rather than layers of braided coherent light) like a feline might flick its tail, in anticipation of a strike, a kill, a meal – yet, about halfway through the woman’s charge, her form flickers, fades, and defocuses, like a bad holo, the handle of her whip morphing into the barrel of a blaster, her slenderness seeming to gain impossibly in both height and bulk, and, after waking with a strangled gasp, soaked in sweat and badly tangled in her bedclothes, the dream fades to a strange indistinctness and does not return, so she does not think of it again, afterwards.

 **21.) Torture:** In the end, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that going on missions with Obi-Wan and his Master are essentially a form of torture, for her: firstly, she’s stuck in close proximity with that damned crink, Jinn, having to be polite and respectful and even occasionally obey him as if he were her own Master, just because he outranks her; secondly, she’s forced not only to stand by and watch Jinn treat Obi-Wan like some kind of idiot child he’d apparently just as soon be rid of as try to deal with, _without_ carving the bastard up like a bird for the table, but also to keep from screaming at Obi-Wan with unbridled frustration whenever she can’t stand it any longer and tries to convince him that Jinn shouldn’t be treating him so badly and the brainwashed little idiot just responds by attempting to take up for Jinn and excuse the man’s intolerably bad behavior by claiming to be an incompetent and a clear disappointment to his Master (which he most definitely is _not_!); and thirdly (and perhaps worst of all), she’s crammed in with the object of her most desperate affections and fondest dreams, so close that she can oftentimes practically _taste_ her deepest desire, fearing (and, though she will not admit it to herself until much later, sensing) all the while that nothing will ever come of such closeness and that nothing she will ever be able to do will make Obi-Wan love her or want her back in the same way that she desires him, endlessly tortured by thoughts of what they could have and how happy they might be, if only she could make Obi-Wan truly see her and love her as she so desperately wishes he would love her.

 **22.) Explain:** Siri will do her level best to try to tell herself, afterwards, that she was just being optimistic and not stupidly naïve, to hope for so many years that she’d one day be able to catch enough of Obi-Wan’s attention and affection for him to not only truly _see_ her, but to love her, desire her, and become pillow friends with her, too; unfortunately, though, having Garen have to be the one to explain why that can and will never happen, either for her or anyone else, is just so utterly mortifying that she doesn’t stop thinking herself the most idiotic, self-delusional, miserable pathetic excuse for a supposedly sentient being in all of the ’verse for _months_.

 **23.) Mission:** Probably the closest that she will ever get to a declaration of tenderer emotions from Obi-Wan for her comes during the joint mission of their Masters to ensure that the bounty hunter assassins hired to murder twenty leaders at a conference on Rondai-2 will not succeed and the subsequent side mission to save Talesan Fry from the bounty hunter known only as Magus, when, after crash landing on Quadrant Seven and getting separated from their Masters, they think for a time that they are going to die on that ship rigged to automatically explode on reversion (before they figure out that getting dragged out of hyperspace against their will by an interdiction field will get them around the whole problem of how, if they try to order the ship to revert to realspace themselves, the bomb will be triggered to destroy the ship), when she begins to panic and try to tell him that she loves him and he looks at her with those fathomless oceanic eyes and simply quietly and kindly, if wholly inaccurately, attempts to reassure her by declaring, "I know. We will always be good friends, no matter what may come," and, as much as it hurts her and as much as she might wish that it were not so, if she ever wants to be able to function as a true Jedi and to avoid driving herself insane, she knows that she must simply learn to live with that truth.

 **24.) Sorry:** She’s always felt a little sorry for Depa Billaba’s Padawan, Shylar Ynisa Dairivka, and, though she keeps Shylar in the forefront of her mind as a sort of warning to herself to avoid ever becoming so wrapped up in her own dreams and wishes and bitter regrets as to willingly isolate herself from others, her pity for Shylar only increases over time, given that the slightly older (almost two years older than Obi-Wan, actually) human girl has never truly fit in well with or been overly close to any of her agemates and the fact that, though she was, for several years as both an older initiate and a young Padawan, fairly close to Quinlan Vos, their relationship ended suddenly and apparently quite badly, after Shylar realized that the affection between them carried far more weight on her end than on his, with the young woman withdrawing deeply into herself and her studies, afterwards, avoiding all contact with Quinlan and his friends (especially Obi-Wan, whom she both seemed to blame for her loneliness and for Quinlan’s inability to care for her as much as she loved him, though gradually she also apparently came to blame Garen, as, after about two years of deliberately dodging Obi-Wan, she also started to avoid Garen like the plague) and in essence becoming a recluse, associating with no one not directly involved in one of her missions or her instruction and essentially deliberately separating herself from the rest of the Order’s members, throwing herself with such single-minded devotion into her training that she would eventually be Knighted far earlier than is usual, with a human norm Jedi apprentice (with the only good result to this, in Siri’s opinion, being that Knight Billaba gained her Mastery in time to be awarded a seat on a High Council that had far more male than female members).

 **25.) Satisfaction:** She can’t decide if she’s amused of appalled, happy for them or worried about them, pruriently interested or simply disgusted, or _what_ , when she first figures out that Garen and Quinlan are apparently quite frequently seeking not just comfort but satisfaction in one another, in an effort to distract themselves from the pain of knowing that Obi-Wan will never truly belong to either one of them, either; it is definitely with a mixture of wistful loneliness, curiosity, outright envy, and real concern, though, that she eventually approaches Bant, to warn her to keep a close eye on the pair (in case she isn’t doing so already) and to offer to help intervene, if it should ever become necessary to do so, just to be on the safe side.

 **26.) Violet:** It annoys the hell out of her when others refer to her lightsaber as pink: it’s a pale shade of vivid violet that ever so slightly shades towards heliotrope, for pity’s sake (with maybe just the barest hint of slightly magenta and orchid undertones, due to the crystal that called to her in the ice caves of Ilum being ever so slightly variegated in hue, rather than one solid color, the gem composed of several shimmering shades of violet, purple, lavender, indigo, and, yes, even a few pale glimmers of a soft, almost misty rosy pink, all mixed together, with so many different shades of purple in the stone that the pink in it is essentially overpowered), and is a perfectly lovely, perfectly functional, perfectly warrior-like and not at all girlish weapon, blast it all!

 **27.) Danger:** Her danger sense tells her that sending Darsha out alone to bring that Black Sun operative (the Fondorian, Ooloth, who, as the only survivor of the massacre of Black Sun on Ralltiir, turned defector and informant, in an attempt to continue to preserve his life, by telling the Jedi Order about the individual responsible for that slaughter) in from Coruscant’s undercity as the final task of readiness prior to her Trial for Knighthood is a _huge_ mistake on the part of the High Council (a really, _really_ bad idea); there’s nothing she can say that won’t come off sounding as if she doesn’t think Darsha can handle what should, by all means, be a relatively simple retrieve, guard, and ferry operation, though, so she limits herself to hugging her best friend with fierce tightness, telling her that she knows Darsha will do just fine, but warning her to be extra careful, admitting that she has an evil sense about the underlevels of the ecumenopolis and that it makes her think that something or someone far more dangerous than the usual residents and visitors to the lowest levels of the city-planet may currently be loose in Coruscant’s underworld.

 **28.) Fear:** When Darsha’s Master, Jedi battlemaster (or Sword Master, the head lightsaber combat instructor for the whole of the Jedi Order) Anoon Bondara, vanishes into Coruscant’s underlevels as well, after having departed to try to find Darsha, following her failure to either return to the Temple or to check in, and the High Council promptly proposes to send Obi-Wan on a solo mission of his own, to locate both the missing Sword Master and his wayward Padawan, Siri’s not the only one whose danger sense screams at panic-inducing levels and has to go directly to Obi-Wan to demand that he be extra careful (Garen and Bail Organa, the Crown Prince of Alderaan, are both similarly affected, and Siri has no doubt that the only reason Quinlan doesn’t add his two creds to the mix is because he’s currently off on a mission of his own); yet, not even in her wildest imaginings or worst nightmares could she have ever dreamed of what was actually responsible for her sudden fear, and, when she learns that there is at least one Sith Lord involved and that the blasted High Council has sent Obi-Wan and his Master off to Naboo essentially alone, with no backup and no special weapons, even though Master Bondara’s death and Darsha’s nearly fatal wounding have allegedly occurred at the hands of a Zabrak Sith seeking to stop both a stolen Sith holocron with details of a plot to blockade and then invade Naboo from being sold to the highest bidder and the Order from learning of the Sith’s apparent return, the fear that she feels is such that it is debilitating, initially all but physically crippling.

 **29.) Battle:** Siri feels as though she has nothing left to lose – she’s essentially lost her best friend, because of the damned Sith, and the High Council seems determined to make her lose Obi-Wan, as well, if Knight Jinn doesn’t beat the Sith to it by destroying him when he throws him over entirely for that damned former slave from Tatooine he can’t stop harping about – and so, in the end, Garen and Reeft and Bant literally have to get her down and take turns sitting on her, until she’s recovered enough of her calm to keep from either storming the Council Chamber and telling the High Council _exactly_ what she thinks of their callousness, hypocrisy, fearfulness, and ineptitude or else going after Qui-Gon Jinn with her ’saber drawn for battle, for what he’s done to hurt Obi-Wan, not to mention the way he’s likely ruined or at least irrevocably tainted the life of that poor boy from Tatooine he’s supposed to have rescued and to be looking after and taking care of!

 **30.) Offer:** She’s far too busy being absolutely disgusted with and furious at Qui-Gon Jinn for being such a self-centered, destructive, egotistical, fanatical ass to mourn his loss even the tiniest of bits, and her affront and aggravated disgust extend so far towards the rest of the Order that, when Master Windu approaches her with the tentative offer of a long term solo mission that, if completed successfully, will count towards the fulfillment of her Trial of Knighthood, she’s far too pissed off to do anything but accept (even though her Master has some serious reservations not just about the steps it will be necessary for her to take, to undergo such a mission, but the kind of hurt she will likely leave in her wake, when she departs for it) and be relieved to have a valid excuse to (eventually, according to the plan that Master Windu and she and her own Master arrive at) get the frak out of the Temple before she ends up taking a swing at somebody and can get herself kicked out of the Order for her trouble.

 **31.) Message:** She knows how intensely private Obi-Wan can be about his emotions (thinking them such an awful flaw, as he does), and so, when she hears that he and his new Padawan will finally be returning to Coruscant, she simply leaves him a heartfelt message, asserting the fact that she grieves for his pain but rejoices for his advancement and would like to have afternoon meal for him and his new apprentice whenever they feel as though they’ve finished settling in to their shared quarters, and (though she has been prepared to have to push the point, if she hasn’t heard back from him within a week of his return) is quietly relieved (and thrilled) to have him comm her back, on his third day back at the Temple, and graciously accept the offer of lunch.

 **32.) Game:** On the surface, Anakin Skywalker seems to waver alarmingly between being an extremely nice, polite, helpful little boy and being a short-tempered, opinionated brat from the very depths of the worst of all Sith hells, and, even though she knows that the first impression is the closest to encompassing the truth of his core character and the other façade is merely part of some elaborate scheme of Obi-Wan’s to protect Anakin from the High Council by encouraging the Council Masters to be less fearful of him by making him out as less than he is (as if Anakin were little more than another hardheaded and hormonally-challenged youngling trying far too hard to prove himself to be a real Jedi – and so doing far too little to truly behave like one – and not some terrible, awesome figure of prophecy), to be honest, the (undeniably dangerous, and for more than one reason) game that Obi-Wan and Anakin are playing frightens her and the boy himself unnerves her badly, and not just because he literally _explodes_ with symphonies of power whenever Obi is around him or because Obi _feels_ so much like he used to, in the Force, before his so-called accident, whenever he is around Anakin, but because Anakin is always _looking_ at Obi-Wan as if he’s trying to decide how best to eat him (or perhaps how best to have him and to keep him all to himself would be a more accurate description, the boy’s eyes greedy, desperate, calculating, full of an all too familiar sort of absolutely besotted fascination and unstinting love), and the familiarity of that look is not only unsettling as all get out, but doubly disturbing for the fact that Obi-Wan returns the look not with blindness or incomprehension but rather a kind of softness and wonderment, as though looking upon his young Padawan is like looking on one of the natural wonders of the galaxy for him and he cannot quite believe that he is so fortunate.

 **33.) Cover:** In order to make the cover for her secret mission work, Siri’s friends all have to believe that she’s truly left the Order and will not be coming back, so she and Master Gallia arrange to have what amounts to a screaming match so violent that it’s almost worse, in a way, that it’s not physical, Siri for once making good use of the passion that rides so near the surface in order to fuel her furious outburst, ranting and raving with increasing savageness about the hypocritical ways of the Order and the ineptitude and cruelty and fearfulness of the High Council and how having someone like Qui-Gon Jinn be remembered as a good Knight is a frakkin’ joke and a bad one, at that, and Adia Gallia retorting with an increasing amount of bitter acerbity and coldness that Siri always feels things too deeply for a true Jedi, reminding her sharply of the Code and the rules of conduct she swore to abide by when she began training as an initiate and sternly telling her that it most certainly is not her place to question either the Code or the will of the Force, as embodied within the current makeup of the High Council and expressed by the decisions of the Grand Master, gradually growing crueler and more forbidding in her comments until finally, in a fit of uncontrollable fury, Siri yanks her lightsaber off of her belt as though to draw and ignite the blade in anger but instead flings the weapon down at her Master’s feet (so violently that the hilt rebounds, bouncing up at an angle to strike a terrible blow to Master Gallia’s right cheek, the dark skin there instantly reddening and bruising) and, seemingly not even noticing the damage that she’s done to her Master’s face, snarls that she is done with the Order’s platitudes and hypocrisy and moral relativism and that she’s done behaving as if she’s Master Gallia’s personal slave, too, and stalks off to pack her things and go tearing out of both the Temple and the Order, even (seemingly) stealing one of the Order’s small freighters so that she can run away.

 **34.) Pretend:** Of all the things to go wrong with the plan, instead of being off at 500 Republica Way on a visit to Bail Organa, as he’s supposed to be, Obi-Wan is instead inside the Hall of Remembrance, meditating, when she and Master Gallia have their spectacularly ugly blowout, and, having been commed by a panicky Bant (after she blew past the Mon Cal with a snarled, "Get the frak out of my way, you brainwashed fanatic!" on her way to her quarters), literally runs after her to try to stop her, slicing the program for the door to first the suite she shares with Master Gallia and then using the Force to literally rip the door to her private room open, when she refuses to answer his calls or to let him in, arguing so passionately against her leaving (refusing to let her act out of rage, pleading with her to calm down and think things through before she makes any irrevocable decisions, begging her not to take out whatever anger she’s conceived of against Master Jinn, for the sake of their friendship, on her own good Master or the High Council, tearfully asking her to let him help her) that, in the end, she has no choice but to pretend to reconsider and be ready to accept his offer of help, embracing him in friendship . . . and then deliberately calling up the memory of every (unintended on his part, to be sure, though, somehow, that has always made it seem even that much worse) hurt and slight, every sharply stinging, hurtful memory of Obi-Wan turning away from her in incomprehension, every jealousy-inducing, envy-causing, crushingly painful remembrance of acts of warmth and affection towards others (towards Garen, towards Quinlan, towards his new Padawan, Anakin Skywalker, hell, even towards that ridiculous Mandalorian Duchess, Satine Kryze, he spent a year chasing about after, trying to keep from getting killed, during that one horribly extended mission, from which he returned filled with such obvious affection and admiration for the beautiful blonde young Duchess that she came as near as she probably ever had to simply screaming at him in frustration, to demand to know what it was about her that was apparently so damned unlovable and unattractive that he could apparently openly admit to liking everyone under the sun _but_ her), and then furiously hissing, "I just couldn’t live with myself," as she tightly pinches the subclavian nerve in his neck and drives him down into unconsciousness, so that she can still make good her escape.

 **35.) Disguise:** Aside from the fact that their chemical signatures can often be traced or otherwise ferreted out, the main problem with temporary measures like dyes, when it comes to a truly effect disguise, is that they will eventually fade out, wear off, grow out, or otherwise cease to be entirely effective, unless they are periodically touched up, redone, or otherwise renewed in some way; thus, since her mission is likely to take at least three to five years, she opts to go the more permanent route, carefully going about the process of applying molecular-deep tattoos that will not fade or wear off _unless_ specifically treated with a certain combination of extremely specific (and very much so designer tailored) chemicals capable of washing the dye out of her pale skin entirely via her sweat, and then, after removing all of the hair on her body, first altering the color of her naturally blonde hair not by staining it by rather by undergoing a relatively minor form of gene therapy that will, either for the next decade or else until medically reversed, naturally alter the color of her hair, the change in the MC1R protein producing very high levels of the reddish pigment pheomelanin and relatively low levels of the dark pigment eumelanin, after which she uses a combination of intensive protein treatment and the Force (through an extremely delicately balanced understanding of her own body and how it generally naturally functions) to encourage the regrowth of her now extremely red hair, which she then styles into a shorter, banged, layered cut that is highly appropriately different from her regular long, flowing hair (kept as closely as possible to the same length overall), the tattoos and vividly red hair combining in such a way as to make her all but unrecognizable as Siri Tachi (at least to anyone but a close friend or someone already purposefully seeking to identify her as Siri Tachi).

 **36.) Guile:** The Order doesn’t like to admit it (apparently, it would tarnish the Order’s reputation – far worse, apparently, than the fact of it – if it were ever openly acknowledged, admitted, discussed), but most of its members are well aware of the fact that seduction is one of a Jedi’s greatest and most useful stocks-in-trade, as well as something that they are expected to be able to manage, one way or another (at the very least, in such a way as to fake it quite well or to convince those of weak mind and will that the seduction has, in fact occurred, whether it truly has physically or not), especially if one is a young and lovely Knight able to easily influence and mold minds and wills or to sway things in the Order’s favor simply by introducing sex (or at least promising hints or a good illusion of it) into a mission’s proceedings, guile and bewitchment and even sexual distraction, frustration, and/or exhaustion being far preferred by the Order to incidents of outright argument, force, or violence during a mission.

 **37.) Convenient:** Chaelhan is _nothing_ like Obi-Wan, really – he’s tall and dark-haired with bright blue eyes and sun-kissed golden skin, an easygoing smile and an even readier laugh, a real bear of a man with an earthy sense of humor and a physicality that loves to express itself in sport (especially extreme sports of all kinds) and (surprisingly inventive) lovemaking, loving good food and good company and easily satisfied so long as he has something or someone to help keep his attention and keep him occupied or amused – so the very notion that she could ever really fall in love with the young Corellian smuggler is so patently ludicrously improbable as to be all but insulting: no, Chaelhan Lovach is just a convenient means to an end, a way in, a method by which to establish herself in her new alias (as Zora) as someone capable of becoming involved with Krayn’s gang and his kind of criminal organization, nothing more and nothing less than the least painful, most easily taken method for eventually getting where she needs to be to get her mission accomplished in a timely and successful manner, and the fact that he’s oddly sweet and chivalrous and even innocent, in a strange way, for a smuggler who puts forth such a convincing mien of cockiness, brashness, and easy amorality, and that he all but effortlessly makes her laugh like she hasn’t done in _years_ has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that she chooses to use him as her cover and her way in to the fringes of the T’surr slaver’s organization.

 **38.) Undercover:** It would be far easier for (most of) the women of the Order, certainly, since female Jedi are essentially not permitted to procreate, if the Order would just go ahead and surgically see to it that "accidents" would be wholly unable to ever happen; since the young especially are expected to be able to function undercover in a variety of situations, though, and that’s the kind of thing that could conceivably stand out and attract all kinds of the wrong sorts of attention, unfortunately, other means have to be relied upon for safety’s sake.

 **39.) Disaster:** Before she left for this mission, her personal records were unsealed and presented to her, as though she were already an actual Knight: Depa Billaba (perhaps prompted by the Force, for reasons that would never be fully known to the Chalactan Jedi) apparently argued for her right to be able to truly, fully know herself, before being called upon to subsume herself utterly into a mission-mandated alias, a fact for which Siri will eventually find herself hugely grateful, as she’s entirely unsure where else she could’ve turned or what else she could have done, after disaster struck roughly two-thirds of the way into her second year on the mission, if she had not had the contents of those personal records permanently burned into her memory.

 **40.) Possible:** It should _not_ be possible for this to happen – she’s taken her treatments properly, with medicines that she knows, absolutely, are unfailingly effective, and she’s also been using the Force, too, to suppress her natural fertility, just to be on the safe side – but the fact remains that she is still pregnant, whether it should by any means be logically possible or not, and there is no way in Sith hells that she’s going to be able to bring herself to terminate, any more than she’s going to be able to turn herself in to the High Council and let the Jedi Order have her child and then throw her out for the having of the baby, as the rules demand that she should, certain as she is (if for reasons that she cannot even begin to explain to herself) that she cannot and will not be able to permit the High Council to ever have reason to discover the existence of her child, at least not until she is far too old for them to ever attempt to justify taking her into the Temple for training, and that means that Siri’s got a serious problem on her hands . . . one made even more complicated by the fact that she cannot help but to know that Chaelhan desperately wants to have children and will never agree to letting a child of his go, even if she were to attempt to explain to him about being a Jedi and the baby being put in much higher risk not only of discovery as her child but of also being seized by the Jedi Order, if he were to attempt to keep the baby himself.

 **41.) Vengeance:** She does her job too well, and, in the end, it is Chaelhan who suffers for it: with her prodigious memory, ability to get things done (no matter who or what might be standing in her way), and apparent lack of morality and conscience, she rises with phenomenal swiftness through the ranks of Krayn’s people, supplanting and surpassing several criminals who’ve been with him far longer and performing the same kind of work far longer than she has, and it makes her and her brashly good-humored husband targets of spiteful envy and, eventually, efforts at vengeance, and, while she can certainly take care of herself (even while pregnant), Chaelhan is really no match for the kind of hired thugs who are eventually set against him; thus, to her grief, her only consolation, afterwards, will be that he did not yet know that she was pregnant and that his death came for him so quickly that he didn’t have time to see it coming, much less to suffer.

 **42.) Cold:** She cannot help but to occasionally think, afterwards, that Chaelhan’s death was necessary, to protect their daughter, for if he had not been killed, she wouldn’t have had such a good excuse to fake a convincing miscarriage, and, if not for that, then she wouldn’t have been able to arrange things in such a way as to be able to report that the child had been born dead, in which case she would never have been able to arrange to have Karamyn safely smuggled out to Chandrila and to Adilai Kelbek, her mother and the child’s grandmother, where it could then be arranged for Adilai to legally adopt the girl as if she were a refugee orphaned by the troubles in the Outer Rim, so as to protect her from the Order’s notice and arrange to keep the High Council from ever finding out that Siri had borne a child, in which case, Siri honestly doesn’t know what she would’ve done, next – what she might have had no choice but to do – in order to protect her daughter . . . after which she inevitably hates herself for being so cold and desperately wishes that she had not been so lazy as to ever get the poor man mixed up in her mission in the first place, knowing that he never would have met such an end if not for her meddling in his life.

 **43.) Confusion:** The thing is, even though Anakin’s loose lips get her cover blown and her and him both captured and all but killed and even though Obi-Wan has to come to their rescue and keep the both of them from getting blasted along with the rest of the slaves (because for some reason it seemed like a good idea to try to get safely away by sparking riots among the slaves to cover their escape), Siri understands both Obi-Wan’s terrible confusion and hurt and Anakin’s scornful anger when they accidentally cross paths with her again, before she can quite finish gathering enough information to be absolutely sure of utterly dismantling the whole of the operation, if she strikes out at Krayn and his gang legally, and so she can’t even begin to blame them for what happens, even though they muck things up and (in her opinion) that unspeakably evil bastard Krayn gets off way too easily by simply being killed by Anakin (who, in his anger and pain, lashes out, instead of holding back, as told to by his Master, cleanly running the blue T’surr through the chest with his lightsaber), instead of captured and taken in and prosecuted and locked up for the rest of his natural lifespan for all the terrible things he’s done and helped to do.

 **44.) Slow:** She may be a wee bit slow on the uptake about some things, but sensing power and ability and talent isn’t really one of them, and so one of the first things she does, after she’s taken the necessary steps to return herself to her true appearance and been properly Knighted (and properly celebrated, too, Obi-Wan and his friends holding her a congratulation party on the successful passing of her Trials of Knighthood, during which she drinks far too much, laughs much too loudly while boisterously telling one wild story after another of her time undercover, and has to exert herself entirely too damned much to keep from bursting into tears over an innocent toast made by Quinlan "to friends and allies, made and lost along the way," suddenly unable to do anything but remember Chaelhan’s far too still form), is to see about inquiring after Ferus Olin, in an attempt to see about making him her first Padawan learner, even though she has no real clue who the boy’s first Master so briefly was (the Chalactan Knight, Nemaria Tennyai, having been about seven years older than her and tragically killed in an airspeeder-shuttle crash about a month before Siri’s return to the Temple, thereby accounting for the current state of orphanhood of her grieving young former Padawan) and there seems to be some kind of bad blood between Ferus and Obi-Wan’s young apprentice.

 **45.) Extraordinary:** Ferus is . . . extraordinary is the only word that really occurs to her that truly does him anything like real justice: he is extraordinarily strong in the Force; extraordinarily gifted with various Force talents (both common and rare, both those requiring a lot of brute strength and quite a bit of skill and dexterity and careful shaping of the natural flows of the Force’s melodies); extraordinarily skilled with his lightsaber as well as a talented and potentially quite deadly warrior whether armed with physically tangible weapons, the Force, or himself alone; extraordinarily intelligent, not just in the sense of book learning or of natural cunning but in the sense of being witty and able to not only understand how and why things are so and work as they do but precisely how to best use such things to the greatest possible effect towards his own best interests, possessing a keen mind apparently unable to forget things, once read or heard (or otherwise learned), combined in such a way with a slyly razor sharp sense of humor that she cannot help but to be almost painfully reminded of Obi-Wan Kenobi, before the attack, before the coma (and speaking of reminding her of Obi-Wan, it is a damned good thing that she’s just over a decade older than Ferus is, because Ferus is also one of the most extraordinarily graceful and light and full of life and light and the Force and just plain _handsome_ individuals she’s ever met, and if she were Anakin Skywalker she’s pretty frakkin’ sure she’d be a lot more interested in figuring out a way to become pillow friends with Ferus than holding a grudge against him for some misunderstanding and accident that happened over four years ago, to be perfectly honest! Ferus is just – he’s incredible, is what he is. Already showing signs of a greater than average adult height and wide shoulders, slim-hipped and long-boned, luminously pale in a way that can’t help but to remind her of Obi-Wan, with these incredible eyes that seem brown at first glance, because they are dark and are made to seem even darker by the incredibly thick fringes of eyelashes surrounding them, but which are actually a fantastic mix of amber-tinged gray with countless little dark yet bright flecks of blue and green mixed in, forming bizarre but undeniably beautiful mosaics of a sort of dark hazel gray mix that seem to hold all colors and no one single hue, all at once, kaleidoscopically mesmerizing, their overall color shifting through a rainbow of dominant tints depending on his overall mood and the lighting and the tilt of his head and even the nearby presence of certain other hues – again, very like Obi-Wan’s oceanic eyes – and so expressive that one could easily get lost just watching the play of light and color and emotion whirling across them. Though at least mostly brown – except for a stubborn forelock, a bright streak of vivid gold blazoned across the darkness of his hair, as if someone once touched his head in blessing with far too much power held in that hand and so altered that one lock of hair irrevocably – there are red and chestnut undertones to it that mean his hair leaches out to an almost reddish bronze in the sun, and it is thick and full of waves that almost cry out to have fingers run through them, especially now. He’d been on a mission with his previous Master right before her death, an undercover op where he’d been required to have his hair treated to grow out of the Padawan cut, for his own protection, and had been waiting for his Master to find the time to recut it and reattach his braid when she was killed in the wreck. As a sign of mourning, he’s left his hair untouched, and so it curls and waves thickly around his ears, now, creeping down his neck to cover the collars of his tunics and robe, shining both brightly and darkly against their mute drabness. Beneath dramatically dark, thick brows, fringed by an almost ludicrous wealth of long silken lashes, eyes so shadowed that the skin beneath them seems almost bruised glitter and flash like jewels in a face so perfectly proportioned and smooth as to seem carved of alabaster, a delicate wash of color naturally flushing cheeks graced with almost ridiculously chiseled and high cheekbones with the bloom of health, the squared jaw beneath stubborn enough to warn off most seeking to cross his path, speaking of deep reserves of stubbornness as well as undeniable strength of character within. Going by looks alone, Ferus has more than enough allure to make beings flock to him, and, between his intelligence, natural charisma, charm, and many talents, she frankly finds it incredible that anyone could ever resist him), and she feels so incredibly privileged to have him even agree to consider to become her apprentice, if the High Council approves of the proposed match, that it bothers her more than a little that Obi-Wan and Anakin apparently won’t even give him a chance to try to prove himself or his true worth to them.

 **46.) Teacher:** She’s happier training Ferus than she can remember being in a very, very long time, which surprises her more than a little – frankly, she hadn’t thought she’d have either the patience or the confidence needed to be a very good teacher, and only the certainty that the boy surely deserved to be a Padawan again and have the chance to eventually become a full Jedi and that she was available and it felt like a good idea (not just good, but true and _right_ )to offer to become his new Master had even prompted her to try to become anyone’s Master in the first place – and she can’t help but wonder sometimes if it isn’t because his constant presence next to or near to her somehow helps to fill part of the gaping hole left behind by Chaelhan’s death and the necessary (but no less heartbreaking for all that) act of giving Karamyn up to Adilai.

 **47.) Trap:** Darra Thel-Tanis behaves almost as if she were actually entranced by Ferus, sometimes, and Siri can’t help but be reminded of her own unrequited affection for Obi-Wan and hope that the poor girl either has better luck than Siri (especially after she notices that Tru Veld, much like Garen or Quinlan, seems to watch Ferus all the time and to even follow him about the Temple, at times) or else that she somehow figures out a way to avoid falling into the trap of loving and desiring someone unattainable.

 **48.) Natural:** Ferus – who has been labeled a child of Coruscant mainly due to the fact that he was somehow smuggled into the Temple complex itself and then abandoned by someone who didn’t even have the common courtesy to try to hand the small boy over to someone for testing, meaning that nothing is known of his background beyond what the Healers have been able to determine with their tests – is not quite two years (about a year and a half, actually, as close as the Temple Healers have been able to tell) older than Darra and Tru and perhaps eight months older than Anakin Skywalker, and, even though it seems a slightly petty thought, occasionally Siri can’t help but wonder if the reason why Anakin dislikes Ferus so very much has more to do with the fact that Ferus is older and wiser and better trained in the ways of the Force as well as a natural born leader and is therefore fulfilling a role that the former slave thinks he should be satisfying, when it comes to the little circle of agemates who so often surround the both of them.

 **49.) Hurtful:** Sometimes she enjoys the group missions the High Council sends them on with Obi-Wan and his Padawan and/or Masters Ry-Gaul and Soara Antara and their Padawans, Tru Veld and Darra Thel-Tanis, and sometimes she absolutely dreads them and hopes that they’ll pass quickly (the one where she and Obi-Wan have to pretend to be the Queen and King of Cortella and considering enrolling their "children" at the Leadership School on Andara, in order to investigate the suspected kidnapping of Senator Berm Tarturi’s son, in the most awkward, torturous, painful mission she’s ever been on with another person – the fact that, at some point during the mission, both of their Padawans are kidnapped or taken away from the school by someone intending to do murder only makes it that much worse, especially given that Obi-Wan and Anakin have something that almost seems like an argument over Anakin’s failure to go search for Ferus, when he went missing, even though Anakin’s actions resulted in the capture of those behind Gillam Tarturi’s apparent disappearance/kidnapping, the tension between those two and their mutual rudeness both to Ferus and to her nearly giving her a migraine, until finally, for reasons she never becomes aware of, they seem to reach an understanding and go back to simply mostly ignoring Ferus, instead of actively snubbing him – and she nearly cries with relief when it’s finally over); irregardless, she always feels badly for Ferus when they work with Obi-Wan and Anakin, because he just tries so very _hard_ to be polite and useful and clever and to make a good impression and it quite frankly hurts her heart to see the signs of mingled dismay and shame in his bearing or to see that crestfallen look in his eyes when Anakin will snub him or pick an argument with him or just in general be nasty to him (yet again) and when Anakin will be praised for his fine work while Ferus is dismissed or ignored or even disparaged by Obi-Wan, and the whole thing frustrates her because there isn’t really anything she can _do_ about it (she tried to say something to Obi-Wan about it once and his face closed off and he became so cold and hard and sharply hurtful towards her that she’s afraid to try to say anything again, for fear not only of making him truly upset with her but of making things worse for Ferus by making Obi-Wan even angrier with Ferus because of her willingness to defend him, and attempting to speak to Anakin gets her nothing but thinly veiled sarcasm and defiance masked by lip service obedience that is promptly thrown out the airlock the moment she leaves his presence).

 **50.) Likeable:** Obi-Wan puzzles her sometimes to the point of making her head ache, and not just because of his immovable, unreasonable dislike of her young apprentice: she can understand his friendship with Bail Organa easily enough – the man clearly should’ve been a Jedi and he essentially has the beliefs and the soul of a Jedi (despite the fact that he was raised with the expectation of becoming the Crown Prince of Alderaan and all that this responsibility entails, on Alderaan, including a seat on the Galactic Senate and several other patently political roles within the Alderaanian political system), on top of which is the fact that he works often and closely with the Jedi Order, with the majority of his contact with the Order either having been through or else being through Qui-Gon Jinn and his then Padawan or with Obi-Wan himself now – as the Senator and Crown Prince is a man entirely dedicated to democracy and to peace and the well-being of the sentient peoples of the galaxy; she’s never understood why Obi-Wan tolerates so much proprietary closeness from the likes of Padmé Amidala and Sabé Kandala (they barely got a chance to know him at all, for pity’s sake! And as much as she admires and respects and cares for Obi-Wan, he’s _not_ a representative of either the Senate or the heads of the Jedi Order, that they should defer to him and put so much weight on his word and opinions!), though Sabé, at least, is loyal and honest (as much and as often as possible, anyway, from what she can tell) and brave and unselfish and good (which is far and away more than she can say for the girl’s sworn Lady, the two-faced little coward! Amidala may seem wise and strong and courageous and good, but she hides so much behind her handmaidens and decoys that there’s simply no telling whether or not anything that supposedly comes from her in fact originated with Padmé or with one of her handmaidens or decoys, and, frankly, it rubs her entirely the wrong way that Amidala should get all of the credit when quite obviously the Queen and then Senator would not be able to function without the support of her handmaidens and decoys) and likable, if one ever gets to know the real woman behind the political masks she so often wears in public, not to mention being strong enough in the Force both to be interesting and to have a legitimate reason to want to be able to pick Obi-Wan’s brain and learn as much from him as possible.

 **51.) Shaken:** The whole incident with Anakin’s kidnapping by Jenna Zan Arbor’s Vanquor minions and the Zone of Self-Containment leaves Siri feeling thoroughly shaken (she will have nightmares for months, afterwards, of the stupendous amount of unadulterated power and naked promise of sheer destruction that constantly filled Obi-Wan seemingly to and even past the bursting point, thundering all about him in the Force, both during Anakin’s captivity and the eventual revelation that Anakin had been experimented on by Zan Arbor), so they are not with Obi-Wan and Anakin during much of their search for Zan Arbor and the eventual continued search for Granta Omega (who is discovered to be an ally of Zan Arbor) or during the mission to Mawan, as she purposefully requests of the High Council a mission for her and Ferus alone and they are, therefore, given the mission to the mining planet Quas Killam: at the time, negotiating a peaceful settlement between a trinium mining cartel and the people of Quas Killam is both easy enough to seem relaxing and a seemingly useful enough endeavor to make her feel proud of her calling in life, as a Jedi (although she will have cause, much later, to mentally hit herself for her complacency with the outcome of the mission. While she was content, Ferus was uneasy with the results of the negotiations, feeling that the cartel had far made too many concessions to the other group; she did not believe his worry to be enough to justify illegally interfering with the government in order to investigate his suspicions, though. Unfortunately, years afterwards, that same cartel would ally with the Trade Federation and take total control over Quas Killam’s government, giving the Separatists control over all of that planet’s factories and trinium mines, with most Killams not being in the cartel being summarily conscripted or killed, causing her to be wracked with guilt and shame over not seeing the danger posed to the people of that world by the cartel); afterwards, though, she will never be able to forgive herself for not being there on Mawan and perhaps being able to prevent Granta Omega from killing Master Yaddle.

 **52.) Void:** Granta Omega (as the young man insists on referring to himself, though if he truly _is_ the son of the Dark Jedi Xanatos of Telos IV – and, to be honest, she cannot quite bring herself to doubt that he is – then technically he has the right to claim his father’s hereditary titular surname) is a disturbing conundrum of a man: technically possessing so little by way of the Force to be classified as wholly nonsensitive to its flows (especially for a human) and yet somehow or another consistently managing a disguise by which he would apparently make of himself a void, causing beings to either completely forget that they’d seen him or else to be unable to accurately describe him or even to place his face, if they were to see him again, afterwards, the man is like a mocking, hateful, deceptive shadow, a darkness easily lost among deeper darknesses, slipping seemingly effortlessly in and out of notice, using his immense wealth (apparently gained via the inheritance of the Offworld Mining Corporation left behind by his father) to cause as much grief and trouble for the Jedi as possible and to amass a personal collection of Sith artifacts and paraphernalia rumored to be of potentially galaxy-shaking danger, in the wrong hands, the relationship he’s cultivated with Jenna Zan Arbor resulting in an appalling wedding of talents, malevolence, and amoral and immoral interests that frankly sometimes make it hard for Siri to sleep at night, even before she’s had the dubious honor of meeting the man for herself and discovering firsthand the extent of his pure maliciousness and absolute lack of anything approaching morality or conscience.

 **53.) Mess:** The joint mission to Romin is a frakked up mess from start to finish: corruption in the Senate having allowed for the passing of a law that makes it illegal to arrest or transport galactic criminals off of Ronim seemingly forbids them from going after Zan Arbor, who has been tracked to Ronim by Obi-Wan and Anakin; yet, Obi-Wan insists on going after her anyway, by impersonating a gang of thieves known as the Slams, so recently apprehended that their capture has not yet been reported, and the High Council allows it, even though Ferus actually steps forward to argue vehemently against the plan, claiming that the Jedi should be able to capture Zan Arbor without resorting to such trickery and that the Order is supposed to be helping to keep the laws, not breaking them at will, even if they are unjust (adding that it is their responsibility to see to it that the corruption that allowed for the passing of such a patently unethical and unfair law in the first place is exposed and that this is what they should be focusing on, rather than ways of working around the law); subsequently, Obi-Wan and Anakin both treat Ferus essentially as if he were their enemy for basically the entire mission, with Obi-Wan’s behavior towards Ferus actually taking a turn for the worse halfway through the mission, after Ferus apparently attempts to say something to him about what he perceives as Anakin’s rather worrisome conviction that his elevated personal power also gives him an unquestionable sense of right judgment; then, to make matters worse, Ferus and Anakin are temporarily captured by the resistance movement against the planet’s corrupt leader, Roy Teda, and, again over Ferus’ protests, she and Obi-Wan eventually agree to steal codes from Teda’s palace that will allow the resistance to deactivate his droid army, supposedly allowing a nearly bloodless transition of power . . . resulting in riots in the city that allow Zeda and Zan Arbor to flee without being captured; thereafter, the real Slams, freshly escaped from prison, arrive on Ronim and denounce the four of them as imposters, just when they’ve tracked Zeda and Zan Arbor to their hideout, at which point they’re captured and thrown in prison; then, even though they manage to free the other (largely falsely imprisoned) prisoners and demoralize Teda’s army, forcing Teda and Zan Arbor to surrender, when they bring them before the new leader of Ronim (Joylin, the former leader of the anti-Teda faction), Joylin betrays them, deliberately releasing Teda and Zan Arbor and giving the real Slams permission to leave Ronim, wishing to use their flight as an excuse to justify his planned execution of Teda’s followers; and, though Anakin somehow senses Joylin’s intentions early enough for them to have still been able to capture their enemies, Obi-Wan finds information on Zan Arbor’s datapad indicating that she’s still working with Granta Omega and planning on rendezvousing with him, so, instead of capturing anyone, they end up placing a tracking device on the Slams’ ship, hoping that it will allow them to track the criminals to Granta Omega, allowing them to arrest the whole lot in one fell swoop that, unfortunately, will very likely never end up materializing, given that, though they do, eventually, successfully manage to track Zan Arbor and Teda and the others to Falleen, where confirmation is found that the insane scientist is indeed working with the son of former Dark Jedi Xanatos of Telos IV, before they can really do much of anything useful (aside from scare the owners of Blackwater Systems into blowing up a new factory that’d been built entirely without regard for safety laws), Master Windu ends up calling them back to Coruscant, to help defend the Jedi Order against the accusations of an anti-Jedi faction of the Senate attempting to deprive the Order of official Senate authority for the actions of the Jedi.

 **54.) Scheme:** Distracted by an apparent scheme of the Slams to use some of Zan Arbor’s Zone of Self-Containment drug to let them steal the vertex being donated to the All Planets Relief Fund, it takes far too long to figure out that the real plan is for Zan Arbor and Omega to use the Zone of Self-Containment in the Senate so that they can assassinate Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, so that Bog Divinian (the leader of the anti-Jedi faction in the Senate) can propose the election of Senator Sano Sauro (an ally and apparently former mentor of Omega’s) as Palpatine’s successor, with the current hearing in the Senate on the Jedi’s apparently highly illegal actions on Romin and their failure to protect the Supreme Chancellor being used to raise enough sentiment to allow for Sauro’s election: though Obi-Wan gets to the Senate just barely in time to prevent Omega and Zan Arbor from releasing the biochemical weapon, he isn’t quite fast enough to stop them from launching hundreds of kill-enabled seeker droids programmed with the vital statistics of the Republic’s Senators (including the Supreme Chancellor himself), and, though Anakin and Siri and Olin soon catch him up and Olin is successfully dispatched to protect Palpatine (for which success the Jedi High Council will later recognize his heroism, presenting him with a special commendation that will only deepen the rift between him and Anakin, not to mention incurring the extreme displeasure of Obi-Wan, who will flatly declare that perhaps if Ferus had been less concerned with showing up Anakin, during their capture of the Slams, they might have been able to get that accomplished more quickly and so been able to discover the truth of the plot against the Senate and the Supreme Chancellor that much sooner and therefore also been able to get back to the Senate in time to prevent the release of those blasted seeker droids), unfortunately, Zan Arbor and Omega _still_ somehow manage to escape, in the chaos and confusion, with some twenty-one Senators dying amidst the carnage, as well as the criminal Roy Teda, meaning that all of their hard work and struggle to not only bring Teda to justice and expose those responsible for the unjust laws on Romin that have made it a criminal haven but to capture Omega and Zan Arbor and see them tried for their crimes, too, has essentially been for nothing but the protection of a politician who (in her considered opinion) doesn’t deserve the title and position he occupies.

 **55.) Rest:** Whether Siri entirely desires it or not, she is quite firmly told by the High Council that she and her Padawan (much like Obi-Wan and his Padawan) are being given some time to rest and recuperate from their recent string of difficult missions and are not expected to report to the Council Chamber for a new assignment for at least twenty if not thirty full days; therefore, in an attempt to take advantage of the lull (however unwanted it might be), she records a message for the young Senator of the Bormea Sector, and, after sending it, waits patiently to hear a response.

 **56.) Arrange:** Since her mother initially made provision to periodically check up on her when she allowed the Jedi to take Siri to the Temple for training (even reserving the right to initiate conversation with her, once Siri had been Knighted, if Siri so wished to permit it) and, moreover, since Adilai also belongs to a politically well-connected family (especially given her personal closeness with Mon Mothma’s mother, Tanis, who was good friends with both Adilai and with the youngest of her older brothers, growing up), Adilai wisely chose to take advantage of both that old concession and her own not inconsiderable power to initiate contact with Siri, after she’d returned to the Temple and been properly Knighted, so that she could keep in touch and allow Siri to keep track of Karamyn without drawing down the High Council’s suspicion, eventually using Mon Mothma herself as a sort of blind go-between, after she and Siri managed to become friends, despite their fairly different backgrounds and temperaments; thus, it is Mon who most often brings Siri news of or direct word from her mother and her child, though she is positive that the young Senator has no idea that the young girl her mother adopted and is raising as her own is, in fact, actually Siri’s daughter.

 **57.) Suspect:** Sometimes, though, she thinks that Obi-Wan must suspect (if he hasn’t guessed outright) the nature of her secret: when, at the tender age of barely nineteen, Mon Mothma was elected the youngest human or near-human Senator ever to be recorded (or at least preserved) by Republic history (though her actual term as Senator would not start until the following year, of course, with her formal swearing in), not for Chandrila but instead for the Bormea Sector, it was initially largely accounted as a sort of gimmick, something arranged by powerful friends of Mon Mothma’s in the Senate as either a stunt or a visible sign of their strength, and many assumed that the teenager would swiftly grow tired of her new duties and retire back home to Chandrila the moment her first term ended; however, when she throve in her new position, proving herself to be an extremely capable politician, and sought and received a second term, a large celebration was held in her honor, meaning that Siri’s mother, Adilai, as a close friend and adviser, perforce had to come to Coruscant to help mark the occasion properly, and that Karamyn, being a fairly young child still who did not sleep well when too far distant from her adoptive mother, also had to be brought along, Mon Mothma even graciously extending her an invitation to the party, so that she would not feel left out of the festivities, and so of course, since Siri happened to be on Coruscant for once (having just been called back to the Temple by Master Windu, after Romin, and basically waiting to see what would happen next, both with the whole Zan Arbor and Omega thing and the issue with Teda and Romin and the Senate), during the natural progression of the evening, while Siri was using both her connection to her mother and the finessed acquaintance with Mon as an excuse to visit with her daughter, Obi-Wan, being a good friend of Crown Prince and Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan (who just happened to be a mentor and good friend to Mon Mothma), happened to make his way through the crowd to Mon, who in turn led him to Lady Adilai . . . and to Siri and Karamyn, at which sight Obi-Wan stopped, stock still, eyes wide and dark with some emotion she could not even begin to name, her whispered name, "Siri," uttered so very softly that, had it been any other speaking, she never would have heard her name at all, never would have turned about in answer with Karamyn caught close in her arms, clasped to her heart, small blonde head resting comfortably over one shoulder, so utterly shocked to see him there (though in retrospect she should’ve expected him to be there, should’ve known that Bail would invite him and that he would of course accept, his friendship with the Crown Prince having only deepened since Bail’s offer to shelter Obi-Wan and Anakin on Alderaan, in the immediate aftermath of Naboo, if the High Council and Coruscant did not want them) that she could do nothing but stare, eyes wide, face probably telling him everything he needed to know, until finally Karamyn, roused from her half drowsing state probably by the sudden tension in Siri’s body, twisted around in her arms to look curiously at Obi-Wan, with (adorably) wide blue eyes of her own, and blurted a surprised but undeniably delighted, "Obi!" breaking the tableau.

 **58.) Heart:** For as long as she lives, Siri is quite sure that she will never forget the clenching of her heart when, after squirming to be let down, Karamyn rushed over to him to turn her trusting, adoring face up to Obi-Wan, all smiles, and Obi-Wan carefully knelt down to put himself more on her level of height, the two of them conversing a little – Obi-Wan introducing himself with a smile, even though she seemed to know him already, and Karamyn introducing herself and then explaining that she knew all about him "from Momma" as well as from her "honor momma, Siri Tachi" and delightedly exclaiming that the music was even more beautiful around him than Siri had said, innocently asking if he knew how to change the song and doing a little clapping dance of joy when he gravely informed her that a Jedi’s use of the Force did indeed deliberately give shape and form to the music she spoke of, demonstrating for her by momentarily creating a small ball of opalescent light hovering above the upturned palm of his right hand, making the Force ring and chime joyously with the simple song of light and color – after which Karamyn laughed and threw herself into his arms to hug him in thanks and Obi-Wan very carefully folded her small form in close to him, his bright head laid gently down against her silky fair hair, his face tilted up towards Siri, oceanic eyes dark, haunted, his expression tight with something almost like pain as Karamyn squeezed him tight and his right hand automatically came up to help support her small head: in that moment, Siri was certain that he would say something, that he surely _must_ say something of what he was thinking, what he knew; yet, after a few moments, he merely turned his head slightly to whisper something in Karamyn’s nearest ear, making her giggle and stoutly pronounce that he was funny and she _liked_ him, peals of silvery high giggles escaping her as he swung her up in his arms, pressing a kiss to her right cheek, before bodily passing her back into Siri’s arms, smiling at them both gently, sweeping them a low bow before turning to Adilai and quietly pronouncing, "You have a very lovely daughter, Lady Kelbek. I am honored to have met her . . . and you."

 **59.) Care:** She was too afraid to try to say anything to Obi-Wan herself and far too nervous to do much of anything but hesitantly mention to her mother that she had not been expecting Obi-Wan to be at the party and that she feels a little strange about him having seen all three of them together like that (to which her mother merely smiled at her softly and reminded her that Master Kenobi knows that Siri is her daughter, reassuring her that she’s certain he’ll have merely assumed that she either adopted Karamyn because the little girl reminded her so much of Siri or that she’s the girl’s actual mother – meaning that the adoption was arranged to protect her reputation, since she is unmarried – and that this is why the little girl may seem to be so very like Siri, and that Siri should not worry in any case, as the little girl is far too old for the Temple now and the Order has no right or grounds to even try to inquire after her); however, she did try to find out, through Mon, if Obi-Wan might perhaps have said anything unusual about her mother and Karamyn (and Mon, who seemed to realize without needing to be told both that there’s more to Karamyn than meets the eye and that it’s important that nothing ever be said to draw excess attention to her, merely looked at her a little askance, seemingly calculating possibilities in her head, without ever trying to ask Siri to explain herself or to ask any questions about why Karamyn’s obviously so very important to her, even though she’s plainly curious, before simply nodding her head. She told her that she’s not aware of Karamyn or Adilai coming up in any conversations with Master Kenobi, aside from the general observations that Siri is very like her mother and that Karamyn seems to be an extremely bright little girl, and then agreed to ask Bail to tell her if Obi-Wan were to make any inquiries about either Adilai or Karamyn), and, though Obi-Wan apparently hadn’t said or done anything to indicate a greater interest (or indeed much of an interest at all) in Karamyn, Siri couldn’t help but feel as if he must have known that Karamyn’s special to her and so was merely taking care in order to ease her worries: now, given how very upset Obi-Wan has been both with her apprentice and with her, she cannot help but to be anxiously concerned over the possibility that he might choose to break that careful silence, even though she knows, deep in her heart, that she is doing him a grave injustice, by fearing so.

 **60.) Sanctuary:** A message – cryptic in its wording but entirely plain to her heart, for all of that – comes to her from the royal courts of Alderaan roughly two weeks into her enforced vacation, informing her that a certain offer once made to two mutual friends has been extended to another two mutual friends, on the off chance that similar circumstances of unfriendly attention might ever be brought to bear against them: Obi-Wan and Anakin having traveled to Alderaan, on the express invitation of the Crown Prince, to spend their mandated furlough amongst the living splendor of the Shining Star of the Republic, Siri knows that Obi-Wan has arranged for Bail to extend the offer of sanctuary to her mother and daughter, should circumstances ever warrant the need for them to claim it, and is instantly both enormously ashamed of herself, for ever having doubted Obi-Wan friendship or goodness of heart, and immensely grateful, for having had such a burden lifted off of the mental shoulders of her conscience.

 **61.) Test:** Due to the noticeably increasing influence of the Dark Side, the High Council decides, roughly eight years after the Naboo incident, that they should begin trying to accelerate the promotion of Padawans to the rank of Knight; yet, due to the magnitude of the decision, the High Council also decides to proceed cautiously and slowly, starting the new program with a trial of but one Padawan test case: she is not overly surprised when the Council Masters choose Ferus Olin for this trial run, but she is shocked by both the vehemence with which Anakin Skywalker argues (attacks, really, to be truthful) the decision, claiming that he is the more powerful Padawan and that he, therefore, deserves to become a Jedi Knight first, and the obvious unease that Obi-Wan displays towards the High Council’s choice, first by claiming that the whole program is a dangerously misguided notion that will likely result in nothing but an increase in casualties among new Knights, and secondly by claiming that the Council Masters will likely be disappointed in their test subject, before all is said and done, Obi-Wan’s measured disapproval both worrying her and, in an odd way, hurting her feelings, given that she is, after all, Ferus’ Master and his judgment against Ferus comments on her ability, as well, as a Master.

 **62.) Doom:** She has a _bad feeling_ about this mission as soon as she hears that the High Council has apparently tracked both Granta Omega and Jenna Zan Arbor to Korriban (of all accursed places, the supposed original homeworld of the old Sith species and a sacred planet for the Sith Order, housing as it does the tombs for many ancient and powerful Dark Lords of the Sith and permeated as it is with so much of the Dark Side of the Force), and the fact that she and Ferus are not only being sent to Korriban with Obi-Wan and Anakin (Obi-Wan apparently believing that the secretive second Sith has finally noticed Granta Omega and summoned him to Korriban for a meeting, to reward him for his dedication to the ancient Sith animosity towards the Jedi), but with Masters Soara Antara and Ry-Gaul and their Padawan learners, Darra Thel-Tanis and Tru Veld, as well, only makes that sense of foreboding doom seem that much stronger, to her.

 **63.) Survive:** When all of the young Padawans manage to survive being lost in an ancient Sith monastery, despite attacks by numerous super battle droids and a Dark power that may very well have been the mysterious second Sith Lord (who manage to slay their contact on the graveyard planet, a thief and worker of the local black market known as Auden, with frightful ease), and they all meet up again safely, Siri foolishly allows herself to hope that the worst is over and that they’re going to make it through this mission with everyone intact, after all; she should have known better, though, and trusted her feelings, heeding the warnings of the Force, for when they make their way to the Valley of the Dark Lords, in pursuit of Omega and Zan Arbor, disaster and tragedy strike, and, afterwards, nothing in her life is ever quite the same again.

 **64.) Mourning:** Darra Thel-Tanis’ death feels like a sun being extinguished, in this terrible and Dark place; Ferus’ disbelief and horror and pain hit her like hammer blows, flooding the Force with more darkness; Tru Veld’s agonized shock and shame and self-blame merely reinforce the flood of the dark tide of emotion permeating and mixing with the Darkness of this place; Anakin Skywalker, though . . . Anakin is like an explosion of righteous rage and suffering, a roaring inferno blazing with an indescribable power that, in the instant it butts up against Obi-Wan’s unabashed grief, somehow literally throws back the encroaching pervasiveness of the Darkness, even though it only replaces it with an awful sense of terribly furious determination and mourning, phantom sounds of keening echoing in her ears in an awful, awesome din of noise.

 **65.) Evidence:** Of all the things that she may have thought were coming, she never could have possibly imagined this: Ferus has been a perfect Padawan to her, so far as she knows, with none of the problems that they have suffered together really being his fault, in her opinion, and so she’s not sure whether she should feel more betrayed, shocked, or angry when Obi-Wan comes before the High Council with supposed evidence against Ferus, to not only prove that he was essentially responsible for Darra’s tragic death in battle but that he had, for quite some time, deliberately been using a very particular kind of Force talent of his – a kind of combination of modified mind trick and alter will talent – to sway the opinions, beliefs, and even the memories of others around him, both to make them either overlook his faults or else blame others entirely for his mistakes and to frankly make them more susceptible to his will and liable to obey him . . . and that he had attempted to use this talent on the surviving members of the mission to Korriban to convince them to place the blame for Darra Thel-Tanis’ death on Anakin, irregardless of the fact that Anakin was not to blame and had in fact attempted to vehemently argue with Ferus about his attempts to repair Tru’s damaged lightsaber and been ordered by Ferus (as the highest ranking Padawan among them) to stand down and to refrain from even touching the lightsaber (the failing of which at a crucial moment had caused Ferus first to relinquish his own ’saber to Tru during the fight and then Darra to throw herself in between Ferus and Omega, taking the blaster shot meant for Ferus and becoming mortally wounded in the process).

 **66.) Glamour:** Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the entire experience is that the High Council Masters themselves are not at all immune to Ferus’ mind-warping talents: when he gets up to speak in his own defense, he talks eloquently, passionately, and with not so much as a single word of truth, weaving a spell so subtle and so powerful that even the Grand Master nods along and pronounces that "a good boy, you are, Ferus Olin," getting so far as to begin to make a move to dismiss the case brought against Ferus (and quite possibly to begin proceedings to try Anakin for the same crimes) before Obi-Wan forces his way back into the Council Chamber with Anakin (the two of them nearly shattering the doors, in their haste to get in) and the two of them do _something_ (later, she’ll never be able to even figure out what it was, other than that it felt something like a shield being erected and something like an explosion within the Force) that violently banishes the glamour and recalls the members of the High Council to their senses, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that Ferus is, indeed, apparently guilty of everything he’s been charged with (and quite possibly more, as well) . . . or at least more than capable of having done everything he’s been accused of, given that he’s been attempting (successfully, up until the interruption!) to use his strange talent to try to sway the High Council to his side.

 **67.) Mind:** Siri frankly feels as violated as if she’d been deliberately mind-wiped by someone she trusted and admired and cared for – that is, in effect, what Ferus has been doing to practically everyone around him (except for Obi-Wan and Anakin, who were, for reasons she cannot even begin to guess, apparently somehow immune to his brand of forcible persuasion) for the Force alone only knows how long, after all, just as the Force alone only knows how many of her memories he’s accessed or taken or altered against her will (using the Force to make her comply), not to mention what he could’ve merely made her not notice or simply erased altogether from the register of her mind, in their time together – and so she flatly informs the High Council that she does not believe she will ever be able to muster enough trust to be able to take on another apprentice, at least not at any time in the foreseeable future.

 **68.) Protect:** The Feeorin pirate, Nym, is not, by any stretch of the imagination, either a very stable or a very peaceful being, but he is, in his own way, an honorable being, especially when it comes to defending those who cannot defend themselves against the rapacity of the Trade Federation, and he is also, in his way, extremely easy to understand and (relatively) trustworthy in his simplicity, and so she finds that she is content to make common cause with him while she is able and to befriend those of his pilots and fighters among the Lok Revenants she can, helping to protect the citizens of the Republic one battle at a time, as necessary and needful.

 **69.) Insane:** The whole of the galaxy seems to have been going insane, little by little, for quite some time, with conditions becoming more awful or more ludicrously imbalanced apparently by the day, so while she’s shocked by the sheer violence of Geonosis, she’s not exactly surprised by the fact of the war itself breaking out, given the way that things have been going lately.

 **70.) Battle:** She spends most of the battle in the cockpit of one of the new Delta-7 _Aethersprite_ starfighters, helping her old Master, Adia Gallia, and a number of other Jedi guard the Republic transports in the airspace above Geonosis (even though she burns to be down on the ground, where she knows Obi-Wan is, with Anakin and Amidala); she sees and hears enough to be certain that there was an evil loose in those caves on Geonosis, though – droids and the Geonosians could not possibly have accounted for the amount of carnage there, especially given how many young Jedi were apparently so targeted that whoever or whatever was responsible for their deaths carried their lightsabers and other weapons created with the same frozen laser technology away, as if to keep them as trophies – and so she’s also one of the few who (though utterly horrified) is unsurprised to learn of the existence of a cyborg Kaleesh, apparently trained by Dooku to be able not only to effectively battle but to specifically target and destroy Jedi warriors.

 **71.) Disquiet:** Though she and her former Master manage to defeat amoral mass-murderer Cavik Toth and overcome not only his personal squad, Sabaoth Squadron, but his fleet of Hex destroyers prior to the release of the chemical weapon and bioagent trihexalon before it can be deployed against any others than the Point Modie colonists on Maramere – Adia Gallia dispatching the monster herself, in a battle over Geonosis – afterwards, Siri is plagued by a lingering sensation of disquiet, unable to quite bring herself to believe that they’ve seen the last of the particular threat posed by such a dangerous bioweapon and fearing that, even if that particular form of the toxin has been effectively removed from the Separatist arsenal, the ore capable of being refined into such a massively destructive weapon will only end up being twisted by the Separatists into yet another bioweapon for use against the Republic at some point further down the line, if they are not careful.

 **72.) Fly:** _Force_ , but she loves to fly, to shoot, to be free to fall both inwards and outwards all at the same time and ride the cresting of the Force and _know_ absolutely that she’s only an extension of the Force and its will, and she has missed this terribly, since those days undercover among Krayn’s gang; yet, there is nothing that could possibly give her more pleasure than for the war to come to an end and for her to therefore lose all reason to fly as she has been doing (save one, and that is so impossible that she’s no longer so foolish as to even truly try to wish for it, anymore).

 **73.) Off:** There is something seriously _off_ about the relationship between Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala – she can _feel_ it, every time she’s at all close to the two of them and they’re within eyesight of each other – but Anakin isn’t exactly the most open person, when it comes to revealing his true feelings or thoughts (except, of course, for when he’s angry), and she doesn’t precisely have the best track record, when it comes to judging people (especially Padawans, which Anakin still is), so she doesn’t trust herself to do any more than to ask in a sort of careful sideways fashion whether or not Obi-Wan thinks that the two might perhaps be growing too close or experiencing a difficult amount of rising tension on account of being in such constant close physical proximity without also being able to experience any true emotional closeness, on account of the rules of the Jedi Order and the constraints of the Senator’s life, conscientiously leaving sorting the mess out up to Obi-Wan, since he knows the both of them far better than she could ever claim.

 **74.) Bad Feeling:** Being assigned a mission that apparently includes Padmé Amidala is not her idea of either a very proper kind of mission or of anything she’s liable to enjoy very much, but it’s not until she finds out that Magus – the bounty hunter who escaped from the Jedi previously, all those many years ago, when she was still a relatively new Padawan and Obi-Wan was apprenticed to Qui-Gon Jinn – is involved that she begins to get what can only be described as a _very_ _bad feeling_ about the entire operation.

 **75.) Mortal:** Obi-Wan being Obi-Wan – being capable of the kinds of literally impossible things that he so often proves to be able to do, in an emergency, if he acts before thinking or out of what he perceives as an unquestionable immediate need – odds are good that he could probably keep her alive long enough to get her bandaged up and then get her to a bacta tank, channeling enough of the Force to literally stop her wound and force her heart to keep beating, making her hold on and recover, whether her body should be able to survive this or not; the wound is a mortal one, though, and she knows it – _senses_ that it is time for her to go and that she should not try to fight it – and so she delays letting him know how badly she’s been wounded until the last possible moment, and then lets him argue just enough to push things past the point where she’s certain he could’ve still interfered, giving him the warming crystal because she suspects that he will see to it that it eventually gets to Karamyn, one way or another, whether he really _should_ see to such a task or not: as he bends over her, his fingers gently closing around hers on the blue stone, there’s a quality of light in his eyes that reassures her that she’s not wrong about that, and so she manages one last smile before murmuring, "It was enough just to have known you, to have had the chance to love you, my friend," reaching up to touch his cheek gently before admonishing him, "Don’t worry so much," and allowing herself to fall fully and finally into the Force’s lovingly reaching embrace.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Warning:** This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Siri Tachi’s (Karayen Arœna Kelbek Namidka’s) life, as she has been and is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU **Star Wars** series **_You Became to Me_**. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
> 
>  **Clarification Notes:** **1.)** Siri is a very old friend of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s, she is a Jedi, and she’s not an idiot (hence, most of the relationship labels on this story)! **2.)** Readers should **_please_** note that the details of Siri’s backstory as regards to her parents and her short-lived marriage and sole child are wholly my own invention, given that the character’s creator (Jude Watson) never bothered to flesh out her character enough to indicate where she originally hailed from or what she may have been doing during the approximately four or so years that she spent undercover, attempting to infiltrate the slave trader Krayn’s crime ring. Readers should also **_please_** note that I’ve altered some of the details of Siri’s life when it comes to her relationship with Obi-Wan Kenobi, as recounted in the Expanded Universe (EU) by her creator, Jude Watson. One doomed/tragic/dangerous/forbidden love affair not recounted in the canon or essentially demanded by the existence of previously written (i.e., post-OT created, as with the case of Corran Horn) characters is just about all that I can comfortably swallow, when it comes to members of the Jedi Order, and, unfortunately for Siri, Qui-Gon Jinn’s torrid little verbal/emotional (if not precisely confirmed in the EU to also be physical) affair with Knight Tahl precedes Knight Tachi’s supposed doomed, denied love with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Repetition makes me angry, folks, especially when a current generation seems to fail to learn anything from the mistakes made by a previous generation (or generations), and frankly I find it a bit difficult to imagine that apparently **_every_** major figure in the Jedi Order was apparently secretly in love with some other random member of the same Order and that the High Council was too bloody blind to ever notice a single blasted one of these illicit lovers, so . . . Siri gets to love Obi-Wan, as practically **everyone** seems to love Obi-Wan, but she’s never anything more than a friend to him, in my version of events (and not just because he’s taken that pesky vow of his. In all honesty, I doubt Obi-Wan is the kind of person to casually initiate any kind of relationship with someone knowing that, so long as he is a Jedi, nothing can ever come of it, and I doubt he would be so cruel or so careless of his vows to the Order to encourage another Jedi to form an impossible attachment to him), and frankly I think that makes Siri both a stronger and a realer character, for having had a life of her own separate from her impossible longing for him. And as for Siri’s name, well, Siri is supposed to be a diminutive of Siriana, which is a variant of Sigrid, whereas a tachi is both a specific kind of long, curved Japanese sword and the style in which that weapon is worn (ironically enough, hanging with the edge down from the warrior’s obi), so . . . I’m guessing folks can understand where I’m going with the whole duality thing already implicit in the EU name with the expanded legal name for her here and why I’ve done it. **3.)** Do I actually need to explain that, after casting Siri Tachi as a blue-eyed version of Katee Sackhoff, it became all but inevitable that, upon learning more about her EU history, Chaelhan Armas Lovach would end up looking like Michael Trucco? Please keep in mind that the reimagined **BSG** overlaps with my version of the GFFA! **4.)** One of the reasons why my AU **Star Wars** series _**You Became to Me**_ is not even nearly complete has to do with the fact that I really started writing at the wrong end of the prequel trilogy for an AU series (though, in my defense, when I started what became my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, which is over a million words long, I thought I was doing a sort of one-shot fix-it based on an idea I got for "fixing" RotS by changing something that happens very near the end of James Luceno's EU novel _Labyrinth of Evil_ , which is set immediately prior to RotS). One of these days, I fully intend to rectify that problem by going back and starting from the beginning, with an AU rewrite of TPM, which is why I took the time to do a character study sketch for a supporting character like Siri. She'll be showing up again, in a more prominent role, whenever I get around to that AU rewrite of TPM (and possibly for stories that will be set in between that and my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio). Folks should keep that in mind when reading this, since technically this is spoilerish for at least one AU novel that I haven't gotten around to writing yet!


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